


Phönixfeuer

by blackmetaldahlia



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Betrayer Gods, Childhood Trauma, Crystals, Gen, Lore - Freeform, Names, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Spoilers C2E49, Trauma, but maybe not!, fucked up crystal shit, no editing we die like men, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-28
Updated: 2019-01-28
Packaged: 2019-10-18 06:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17575592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackmetaldahlia/pseuds/blackmetaldahlia
Summary: He’s realized how much weaker his wizardry was, how embarrassing it must have been for his Master to have an apprentice whose magic did not come from discipline. He must be disciplined for the Empire, he must be in control, he must understand the weave of magic and know how to make it fold to his will.He must be able to cleanse without making himself dirty.Theory: Caleb was a sorcerer before Trent broke him.





	Phönixfeuer

**Author's Note:**

> Blanket warning for basically Caleb's entire life. If you want to read my Pepe Silvia grade ramblings about this idea before committing to reading this, I laid them out in the end notes.

The fire in his blood has always burnt, keeping him warm, drawing him to the hearth in his family’s hut. He would sit in front of it, watching the ashes flicker into nothingness into the night, after they had long run out of wood to feed it during the damp season.

It hurts to see the fire go out.

Mutti tells him stories about the _Phönix_ , the firebird that rises from its own ashes, and he dreams of a great red bird that sings to him in a language he hadn’t realized he understands. He follows that bird as it sings about power, about warmth, about the beauty of flame and how it feeds the soul, and when he wakes up, his hands smell like smoke. 

And one cold winter day, he rubs his hands together, and his gloves ignite. “Oh, _liebling_ ,” Mutti whispers as she rubs a harsh-smelling paste into the burns on his hands. “Not you, not like this.”

He keeps following the bird in his dreams, never getting the courage to speak to it, but always happy to hear it sing. He wants to ask its name, to ask why it flies in his dreams, to ask if he too will burn himself to ash and then rise again, but he doesn’t. He stays mute, happily listening, and sometimes he sings to himself long after he wakes up.

 Eventually, he is the one lighting the hearth with only a touch. He can move his hands and whisper words he doesn’t know how he knows, and knock things off shelves with a flash of heat and light that makes something under his skin _sing_ in a way that reminds him of the firebird.

“You have magic,” Mutti tells him, but there’s something sad in her eyes. “You have been given a _gift_.” The words don’t match her tone, but he smiles at her anyways.

He’s fifteen and gangly when the Soltryce Academy begins recruiting. “They can help you,” Vati tells him. “They can make you strong, use your gifts to serve the Empire, like I did.”

Vati walks with a limp that makes working in the fields hard, and he doesn’t talk about where he got the injury, but it’s clear that his time in the army took a toll on him. “But they hurt you, Vati.”

“Ah, _Schatz_ , my pain was for something greater. Perhaps you will be able to understand.”

So he goes to the recruiter, a tall elf woman with her gray hair pulled into a tight bun. “My name is – “

“Your name does not matter,” she interrupts. “We want to see your skill.”

He steps back, and breathes in, thinking of the firebird in his dreams and willing the fire in his chest to explode outwards. And it does – flames swirl around him, he feels burning heat behind his eyes, his blood sings with the joy of _fire, fire, fire!_

The elf’s eyebrows shoot to her hairline, and he grins as he raises his hands to the sky and shoots a _Fire Bolt_ into the air, where it continues to fly for several dozen feet before bursting into a very small firework.

In his dreams, he throws fire that puts those pithy bolts to shame, but he can’t do it yet. _Yet_ , he thinks, as the elf begins scribbling something frantic on her notepad.

One week later, he is learning magic from books rather than from his dreams.

\---

“This is Eighth Position,” his professor explains, tucking her fingers into a shape that looks nearly painful. “It’s primarily used in abjuration casting, and is present in _Magic Circle_ , _Guards and Wards_ , _Forbiddance_ , and _Death Ward_. But combined with Twelfth Position, it becomes a key to certain transmutation spells.”

This magic comes to him just as easily. His brain is like a steel trap, and he knows all seventy-eight positions by the end of his first month at the Academy. At night, he drills them, practicing over and over and over again until his fingers cramp.

Some of these gestures seem to call on the song in his blood, the song that drove him to shape his hand like he was about to flick a bug but move it like he was going to backhand someone when he was thirteen years old. He now knows that the hand position is Fourth Position, and the gesture is Twenty-First Movement, but when he was a teenager, he thought of it as just _Fire Bolt_.

 _Fire Bolt_ becomes _Burning Hands_ becomes _Scorching Ray_ , and Master Ikithon takes him aside and asks him if he knows why evocation magic – _fire magic_ – wraps itself to his will so effortlessly.

“No, sir,” he mumbles, lying. There is a firebird in his soul. A flamesong in his blood.

“Don’t lie to me, my boy,” Master Ikithon says. “You have a gift. Shall we put it to better use than this?”

\---

Master Ikithon names him _Bren_. “Fire is a cleansing force, my Bren,” he says absently, running a hand through short-cropped red hair. “And we must be clean, ja?”

“Ja,” Bren replies, nodding, feeling the fire in his veins, in his heart, in his _soul_.

Under Master Ikithon’s watchful eye, he learns to _clean_. He learns to hold the fire inside, to use it so that he can cast with a spear through his guts, with his hands twisted into unrecognizable shapes, with his tongue numbed with some sort of acid.

Bren Aldric Ermendrud becomes something greater than the boy in the village ever thought he would be. The firebird in his dreams soars overhead, singing of conquest, of victory, of the glory of burning fields, and sometimes in the night sky it burns a deep violet that Bren thinks is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

He wakes from those dreams with his heart pounding in his chest and his blood singing.

They start coming more frequently once Master Ikithon lets him handle the torture chamber. He gets creative with _Burning Hands_ , to great effect, but under the advice of his Master he makes sure not to neglect the finesse of blades or the brutality of blunt instruments.

“Fire cleanses, my Bren, but there are things to learn from the dirt, hmm?” he says in his deep voice, and Bren nods.

He does get to use his flames to cleanse, to burn bodies to ash and scatter them where their traitor friends will never be able to find them. Master Ikithon stands by and watches, head tilted just slightly to the side, as Bren calls the flamesong in his blood and channels it through the fire spells he’s copied into his books a dozen times now.

“I think,” Master Ikithon says the first time he casts _Fireball –_ a spell he wasn’t even meant to have learnt, that called out to him from a dream through the beak of the phoenix that made his blood sing, “that it’s time we made you stronger still.”

\---

He doesn’t cry until he makes it back to his rooms, cradling his aching arms to his chest. There, glowing gently under hastily healed skin, are crystals. Gems dotting his arms where his veins and arteries meet, where his magic channels itself through the positions and gestures he’s drilled into his mind so thoroughly that he thinks he’ll never be able to forget them.

“This will make your casting stronger,” Master Ikithon explains, holding a jagged piece of carnelian up to the light. “Your academic ability is remarkable, but even that is outstripped by your raw power – that thing in you that draws you to flames.”

Bren nods, flinching shut as yet another incision is made.

“It will hurt, but you will bear it, and it will make you stronger.”

Bren thinks of his father saying “my pain was for something greater,” and nods again.

As his skin splits for what feels like the hundredth time now, he doesn’t flinch.

\---

Bren feels ill. He feels _weak_ , he feels like the fire in his soul is sputtering. In his dreams, the firebird is flying further and further away, and no matter how fast he runs, he can’t catch up.

The crystals embedded under his skin glow when he wakes up and retches into the bucket he’s taken to keeping near his bedside. They itch miserably, but he knows that they make him stronger. They make it easier to cast the spells he’s learnt, the spells that don’t seem to come naturally to him the way that _Burning Hands_ and _Dancing Lights_ had.

They come from different places, he knows that in an academic sense, but the crystals make it so much easier to feel the difference. The technical term for what he is – _Sorcerer_ – isn’t what he’s supposed to be: _Wizard_. He once thought he could be both, thought he was doing a good job at balancing the magic that sang in his blood and the magic he controlled by warping the weave around him with gestures and incantations.

But now he’s realized how much weaker his wizardry was, how embarrassing it must have been for his Master to have an apprentice whose magic did not come from discipline. He must be disciplined for the Empire, he must be in control, he must understand the weave of magic and know how to make it fold to his will.

He must be able to cleanse without making himself dirty.

He can’t cast _Fireball_ anymore, but Master Ikithon assures him that he’ll relearn it the proper way in time. That it’s a good thing that his flamesong is more easily controlled. Bren believes him.

He still burns, after all. Fire is still his friend. He still lights torches with a touch, can call on the wreath of flames that caught the recruiter’s attention all those months ago in Blumenthal. He still _cleanses_ , ridding the Empire of those who would do it harm.

And Master Ikithon says that he’s _proud_ , that Bren is doing so well, learning so much, so fast.

Bren doesn’t know that most of the gems in his arms have identical sisters, carefully arrayed in Master Ikithon’s study.

Bren doesn’t know that Krynn soldiers unite under the burning banner of a great firebird, that any sign of the beast in the Dwendalian Empire is to be controlled, lest it spiral the way it had in Xhorhas.

Bren doesn’t know that mages in the Age of Arcanum had perfected a way to rip the magic from Runechildren, and he doesn’t know that mages in the Cerberus Assembly had found a way to do it to other sorcerers as well.

Even if he did know, he would think that his suffering was for something greater.

\---

He goes home a few weeks before graduation, and he hugs his Mutti und Vati and tells them to call him Bren.

“It suits you,” Mutti says with a smile, running her hand through his short hair, the same color as hers. “You’ve made us so proud.” He hugs her and smiles against her cheek, and is careful not to let his arms brush her too hard, in case she asks about the stones that still sit under his skin.

It’s the middle of summer, but he still wears long sleeves. He doesn’t want to explain to his parents what he’s done, not yet. That he’s learning a different way to do magic. That he’s not the same boy that lit the hearth with a snap when he was just ten years old. He doesn’t know _why_ he feels guilty, but he does.

He wakes in the middle of the night to the rolling nausea that he’s accepted as a fact of life, and the gentle glow of the crystals under his skin guides him as he makes his way to the kitchen to find a bucket or pot to puke in.

And he hears his parents plotting treason.

\---

His head is spinning as he raises a hand to the cart filled with hay. His vision seems to waver at the edges. His arms itch.

The cart bursts into flames with a whispered word and _Fourth Position, Twenty-First Movement_. The flamesong in his blood is quiet.

His parents are not.

Something in him _shatters_ – he’s not sure whether it’s his soul or the crystals, but any of the fire inside of him is gone, it’s all outside now, it’s burning his parents alive, cooking them in his childhood home.

Bren, Bren, _lebendig verbrennen_.

Bren can’t move. He can’t think. His parents’ screams stop. The fire in his heart stops. He’s on his knees, staring at nothing, willing his parents to be like his bird, to rise from the ashes, to not be dead, to not be gone, to not be burnt alive, _lebendig verbrennen_ , for him to have failed to live up to his name, but the Phoenix is gone and his mouth is full of ash.

His arms itch. His blood is cold.

The world goes dark.

He is ashes.

\---

Ten years later, he wakes up, and he’s not Bren. He’s not anyone.

He hasn’t dreamt of his phoenix at all in those ten years. As he comes back to himself, he wonders if he would still understand the bird’s song. If he still _wants_ to, if he would just burn his parents alive again if there was still firesong in his blood.

His hands shake.

He tries to control his breathing as he reaches for the gift his phoenix had granted him.

It’s not there.

It’s gone.

The gems in his arms don’t glow.

Not anymore.

\---

Despite not being Bren, not being _anyone_ , he is still far smarter than he has any right to be. Escaping is easy when they don’t expect him to be capable of anything beyond catatonic staring. When he’s been trained to torture, to make it painful, to make death a mercy.

He digs a long, thin shard of bloodstone from his arm with his teeth, staunches the bleeding with makeshift bandages torn from the sleeves of his soft cotton shirt, and he embeds that shard into the neck of the first guard to have the misfortune of opening the door to his room. His cell.

The heat of the blood bubbling around his hands as he holds the guard’s mouth shut reminds him of the heat missing from inside of him, and he gnashes his teeth like an animal as he digs through the guard’s belongings.

He comes away with some gold, a knife, a pair of boots, and an amulet that he recognizes from his time at the Academy. They’re his now.

He leaves the bloodstone in the corpse’s throat and _runs_.

“Ermendrud?” someone yells. “Ermendrud is escaping!”

He runs like he’s chasing his firebird, like it will all be worth it even if his heart burns in his chest and the stitches in his sides spill smoke into the air behind him. He runs like there are orderlies in white clothes chasing him, yelling a name that isn’t _his_ , that can’t be his, because Bren burns but now he’s cold inside.

And somehow, he gets away.

\---

A man who calls himself Harald digs the rest of the crystals out with the knife, leaving awful, jagged wounds behind. Carnelian, quartz, jasper, black tourmaline, obsidian, citrine, onyx, malachite.

 _“Eins…zvei….drei_ …” he mumbles as he carves them out, letting a rainbow of blood-spattered gems fall to the dirt underneath a dead tree. Some of them have cracked, and he isn’t sure whether to count those as one or two, but eventually he comes away with _dreißig_ – he doesn’t remember that many being put in, but he doesn’t remember a lot when it comes to the crystals.

Harald buries the gems under the dead tree, guided by the light of the moon, and heads towards the next town.

\---

Adalbert gestures up with his hands in fourth position, draws them down in twenty-first motion, and hisses arcane words that no longer feel natural on his tongue.

When he was Bren, he felt a tug in chest and a song in his blood that corresponded with the _Fire Bolt_ careening towards whatever he had gestured at. Now, as the simple cantrip lights his fire and he feels the weave of magic warp around him but his blood stay _cold cold cold_ , he doesn’t know whether to laugh or scream.

He sees his home in flames, he hears his parents screaming, he wants nothing more than to take it all back, he wants to be grateful that his blood doesn’t sing the way it did when he cooked his parents alive, he wants to feel the warmth he had gotten from the primal magic in his soul, he wants to sing with his firebird in his dreams, he wants –

Adalbert wants to be nobody again. He wants to be a specific nobody - the nobody he was in Blumenthal, the little boy who could start fires but never thought of burning others, who associated fire with warmth instead of cleanliness. He wants to be filthy again, to have that primal connection to magic rather than the detached impersonal weave.

He smears mud on his face and thinks, _it’s a start._

\---

He still dreams of fire, but this time it’s accompanied by the sounds of his parents screaming as they cook alive rather than the gentle Celestial of his firebird.

This time, when he wakes and dry heaves, there’s another figure in the little cell across from him.

“Oh,“ he mumbles. “Hallo?“

“Uh, hullo?” the figure replies, uncurling a little bit to reveal a small green girl with piercing yellow eyes. “I’m Nott. Nott the Brave.”

The wheel in his head spins, lands on a name he thinks he read in a book once. “Caleb Widogast,” he replies. “Sorry if I disturbed you.”

\---

It’s strange to be Caleb Widogast.

Caleb Widogast fears fire. The Mighty Nein notice it soon enough, how he gets lost in his own head at the sight of people burning. Beau and Mollymauk take…vastly different approaches to this revelation.

Caleb Widogast nonetheless finds fire and flame bending to his will, relishes in the power it gives him. As he recovers bits and pieces of arcane knowledge, scraps compared to what he once had access to, he finds that he can remember his flames easier than anything else. He hesitates to use them, aware that his mind is prone to wander into memories that make him think of being Bren, but fire still remains his closest ally.

Caleb Widogast is awkward. He hadn’t realized that about himself. Before, when he was Bren, it felt like his understanding of the world and how to interact with it drove the fire he conjured. It was easier to weave his way through conversations, despite his less-than-stellar Common. Now, when he forces himself to try and be suave or convincing, he is reminded of everything he’s lost.

Caleb Widogast is capable of love. He loves Nott. She’s like a sister, stealing little trinkets while hiding in his shadow, sharing her spoils with him. He wishes he could keep her warm, forever.

Caleb Widogast is a _wizard_ , a proper wizard who knows all seventy-eight spellcasting hand positions and all one hundred and ninety-six accompanying movements, plus their Tal’Dorean equivalents. He needs his books and his ink and paper and when his body can’t bend the weave of magic around him, there’s nothing else to give. Bren had been able to pull spells from the fire in his soul when it felt like his body couldn’t take any more. Caleb can’t do that.

Caleb Widogast has a goal, and he thinks he can realize that goal. Go back to the nobody that he was in Blumenthal. Let the flamesong burn in his blood without _cleansing_ , and Caleb Widogast can’t think of the word _clean_ without thinking of Trent Ikithon.

Caleb Widogast sings when he’s drunk, and Caleb Widogast finds himself thinking of his companions as _friends_.

Caleb Widogast is an adventurer.

\---

Siff Duthar’s book sits heavy in his rucksack, and sometimes he dreams of burning banners, of rising from the ashes, of the _Luxon_.

He doesn’t dream of his firebird, but he sees traces of it in the frantic draconic scribblings of the madman left forgotten in a research facility not far from Zadash. He wonders what it would take to dream of it again, to hear it singing.

The scars on his arms did not heal well. He wonders if there are still shards embedded under his skin. If he digs deep enough, maybe he can get them all, maybe he can get his flamesong back, maybe he can feel _warm_ again.

Any time he wonders this, he feels sick to his stomach, remembering how his parents burnt at his hands. He wants his fire back like he needs it to breathe, but he feels like he’s already choking on ashes.

“Sometimes I like the way fire feels,” he mumbles to Beau one night, and she gives him a look that tells him all he needs to know – that she doesn’t understand.

Caleb Widogast is a walking bag of contradictions.

But at least he’s not Bren.

Even if he sometimes wants to be.

\---

Nott calls herself Bren, and once Caleb’s heart stops pounding against his ribcage, he finds himself jealous and hates himself for it. He can’t use that name. He’s not Bren. Not anymore.

He flinches every time someone else says it, hates the way it sounds coming out of his own mouth, missing the part of him that could use his name with impunity. Now it’s like a death sentence, like a reminder of what he did to his parents.

Missing the warmth in his chest, the fire in his blood, the firebird that soared in his dreams. It wasn't  _that_ fire that cooked his parents alive, after all - it was the fire he learned as a wizard, the soulless weave-bending of  _Fourth Position, Twenty-First Movement._ But at the same time, it was Bren who still had the flamesong in his blood. 

He doesn't know what he wants, beyond going back to being a nobody.

He calls Nott Bren, and wonders if she knows what it means in his language.

\---

Mollymauk dies, and Caleb wishes he was Bren.

Wishes for fire to run through his veins, wishes that he could wreathe himself in flames and burn Lorenzo from the inside out.

His arms itch.

“Shine bright, circus man,” he mumbles over a makeshift grave, and he thinks of his phoenix rising from the ashes. Mollymauk had done it before. Perhaps he would again.

\---

Caleb Widogast stands in front of a mural in an underground temple, high off his ass, and wishes he was Bren.

The phoenix of his dreams, rendered in ancient stone.

He wants the flamesong in his blood to sing, to revel in its beauty, but instead Caleb Widogast feels polite, distant, academic curiosity.

Something in his chest twinges, and his arms itch miserably.

His mouth feels like it’s full of cotton.

Fjord and Avantika are examining the many-eyed serpent, Avantika drawing a silly face in blood on one of the three elevated figures.

He wonders about Molly and his nine eyes and his resurrection. He wonders about the dreams he had when he was Bren, and before that, when he was nobody.

\---

Nott isn’t Nott.

Caleb isn’t Caleb.

“My name was Bren Aldric Ermendrud.”

He shows them the scars. The signs left from the _experiments_. He wants to rip his skin open again, then and there. He wonders about the pile of shattered and broken gems buried under a dead tree a few dozen miles from an asylum.

Carnelian, quartz, obsidian.

He doesn’t tell them about his parents. He doesn’t tell them about the phoenix. He doesn’t tell them how much has been ripped from him, how it feels like if he casts enough flame and fire he’ll be able to reignite himself. How he wants to bend the weave so that it breaks, and goes back to being nobody, just a filthy little boy with fire in his blood. How if he manages _that_ , he may just let himself burn.

This is private. More private than the name he once wore like a badge. _Bren, bren, verbrennung._

“Caleb for now,” he mutters. He knows who Caleb Widogast is. He isn’t Bren. He isn’t Bren without a firesong in his blood, and he isn’t nobody in a village in Blumenthal either.

But maybe he will be, again.

He may just have to burn himself to ash again, first.

He doesn’t mind the thought.

**Author's Note:**

> So the general idea is that Baby Caleb was in fact a Phoenix Origin Sorcerer with some sort of tie to the Betrayer God's avatar/pet firebird, but his time at the Academy/with Trent and the crystal experimentation broke that part of him and he's progressing in wizardry because he doesn't have his innate magic any more. Also I don't think his birth name is Bren. 
> 
> I'm pulling this mostly from things Liam's said in Talks Machina - stuff about how his charisma is weirdly high for a reason (sorcerer's spellcasting ability is CHA), how he's been choosing spells at levelups with something very specific in mind (this was early in the game, when he had a bunch of fire spells but not, like, Shield or fucking Mage Armor), how it's established that there is a way to steal sorcerous magic in Exandria (from Runechild origin sorcerers, but still). Also, he knows fucking Celestial, and the UA Phoenix speaks Celestial. (The MToF Phoenix doesn't speak anything.) 
> 
> And other, very little things, like his reactions whenever Matt mentions the phoenix figure (which aren't a lot, but my brain won't quit telling me there's something there). This is getting into extreme Pepe Silvia territory, but also I feel like it makes more sense for a sorcerer to come out of a family that had never seen fifty gold in one place. Wizardry, even at level one, is expensive, y'all. 
> 
> The phoenix is the one fucked up patron who doesn't have an obvious tie to an established Betrayer God, but my money is on The Chained Oblivion, with the Strife Emperor as a backup. I think that Luxon is its name, that it gained a following amongst the drow in Xhorhas (this is from the Cobalt Soul Library Adventure Infodump), and the Crawling King retaliated there first.
> 
> [Marge Simpson Voice] I Just Think It'd Be Neat


End file.
